January 9, 2009
Peoria, AZ
Welcome to 2009! We're moving crisply through January; I can't believe it's the 9th already! We had a great New Year's Eve with Ana and Larry, managing to "watch the ball come down" two or three times on TV (well, most of us did anyway; one of us went to bed at 10:00). For some reason, there was no local coverage of local events, just replays of the New York festivities, so that had to do.
Once beyond New Years, we've been puttering about as usual. All of the holiday decorations are down and packed. Our new decoration rules (1. No ladders. 2. If it can't be hung with a zip-tie, it doesn't go up. 3. If we haven't used it for 2+ years, it gets donated.) have helped simplify things greatly, and we still felt like we were in the holiday spirit. Geri finally got her belated gift (that extra special bathrobe she'd asked for in November), which comes in hand on the chilly desert mornings we've been having.
We're back onto the project list after taking time off over the holidays. I've cleaned out the shed, which frees up space so I can rearrange stuff in the garage, which had gotten a bit unmanageable. I spent an afternoon at the coach, hitting a few of the simple changes I wanted to make there, and (hopefully) fixing the small leak in the kitchen sink drain line that we discovered in November. I used a fast-setting flexible urethane "goo" (not sure how else to describe it) that should stay in place. If it doesn't, I'll have to replace the drain pipe. At least I have options. Even though I'm now closer to being mentally "ready" to full-time in the coach (neither of us was when I retired in 2005), it's nice to be able to fix things like this without the pressure of a leaking pipe.
I have a couple of other coach modifications planned for the next few weeks, mostly changes to the storage cabinets to make things better suited to our "stuff". Cleaning up the garage, which doubles as the workshop, was a necessary precursor.
Of course, I'm quite easily distracted these days, having a tendency to start one project only to go off on another. Yesterday's activities ended up along this line: I found four boxes in the garage that held photo albums and loose snapshots. Since these really shouldn't be in the garage (it probably gets well over 125 degrees in there in the summer), I moved them to a spot in the spare room closet. I lost a couple of hours on this project (moving 4 boxes 50 feet?) because I had to look through everything. The pictures fall into two general categories (family and family events, and trips). I found lots of pictures of the grandkids and various configurations of the kids with dates/spouses/significant others - plenty of embarrassing moments there. I also found shots from our various trips to Europe over the years, "Live Aid" and "Woodstock '94", as well as our early years in the RV world, when we'd rent one for a couple of weeks somewhere in the southwest. There were pictures of our "first time" at the Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce, Sedona, and even Lake Powell (when we were there last summer, I knew we'd visited before).
This trip down "memory lane" resulted in a few conclusions. First, we're lousy at organizing photos. Most albums are a hodge-podge of different items, and some series are spread out over several albums. Second, we generally don't label or annotate. Who was that again? Don't remember. When was it that we made our last trip to Paris? If it wasn't for the lighted "An 2000" on the side of the Eiffel Tower, we'd only be guessing. Third, we've got a lot of pictures that never made it to albums. And finally, the digital age may be working against us. There are very few pictures from roughly 2003 on, when we converted mostly to digital. I realized how little film I actually shoot these days (maybe it's time to sell the film cameras?) and how we rarely make prints. Our digital photos are all nicely archived, of course, and some make their way to this blog or get emailed around, but flipping through an album is fun, too. Sounds like a new project emerging: organize, update and annotate. I'll put it on the list!
Well, on to today's projects: walk the pups, a couple of packages to UPS, more work in the "workshop", and a Home Depot run...
on: a group of hawks (white-tailed, I think) has moved in nearby. We've seen them perched in a tree in the distance a couple of times and one of the (human) neighbors says that they've seen a hatchling being cared for. When we walked the dogs last night, a couple of them were having dinner on one of the street light poles, and they were definitely eyeing the pups as a possible meal. I grabbed the camera and shot a few pictures, but the sun was just setting and the light wasn't too good. It did give me a chance to test out the new 2x lens extender that I'd just gotten, and it makes quite a difference on my 70-200mm lens. Click here for a couple of shots of the hawks and a couple of test pictures with the lens extender.
